River Under the Road by Scott Spencer begins an uncomfortable brunch and, in the course of several parties over the following decades, tells the story of a relationship. Grace and Thaddeus meet in Chicago one summer, she's an aspiring artist with an alcoholic mother, he's an aspiring author with parents who love, but don't particularly like him. They both dream of joining a vibrant artistic community, but it doesn't take them long to discover that New York in the seventies is less urbane and cultured than they expected. Grace's careful pencil drawings are not the performance art of the zeitgeist, and Thaddeus begins to worry that maybe he's not capable of writing the literary masterpiece he dreams of writing.

Scott Spencer is such a solid writer. He knows what he's doing, how to build a story, how to write characters who are nuanced and breathe. He writes a little like John Cheever, with his ability to write so that the words never become more visible than the story and with his portrayals of people stuck in moments of ambiguity or quiet discomfort. This was a novel with an old-fashioned feel and while I never warmed to either Grace or Thaddeus, with their innate conservatism, I was always happy to get back to this one and stayed up late more than once with it. ( )